Tessa Hadley on “Honor”

“Honor” is the first in a series of stories that you’re writing about the main character, Stella, isn’t it? Do you see it developing into a collection or a novel?

I’ve already written more stories about Stella. The thing I have under my hands seems to be an odd hybrid—it’s a novel, definitely, but it has an episodic, picaresque structure, rather than growing forward in one smooth curve. Each “chapter” has its own intrinsic shape, its own tone and atmosphere. Chapter 2 has Stella, aged ten, happening upon some of her mother’s secrets and venturing out in the streets independently for the first time. The third chapter revolves around her fight with her new stepfather, and the fourth is about first love. Story—“what happens,” the narrative material—is what drives the whole shape and feel of the thing; only it’s not one overarching story but a succession of strongly colored phases of a life, each dramatically distinct from the others (though, of course, there’s a cumulative effect, too). I find myself more and more interested in the power of narrative. I want to try to capture in writing the mysterious process of a life unfolding and how it feels as it happens. We often imagine that mystery is buried deep inside our lives, but it’s also hidden around us, on the surface. Imagine if we were allowed to come back from the dead for one ordinary day and see ourselves.

Are the events of this story formative for Stella? Do they influence what happens later in her life, or her perception of what happens?

I suppose the point that Stella dwells on—that Auntie Andy is special, somehow, in her receptivity, in her ability to fully become the thing that happens to her—is an explicit reference to what I’m talking about above, the life-shaping power of narrative. And, as this is the formative principle of the book about Stella, it’s also Stella’s own principle. The book begins with Andy’s story because Stella is so deeply impressed by Andy’s dignity—the “honor” with which she takes on her sad fate. She is moved by Andy’s unexpected gift for “carrying things off.” Stella’s life will, by her own account, be built on that principle. Whatever happens to her, she will try to inhabit the shape of her story, to fill as completely as she can the roles that come her way. Also, the violent drama of this first story does set the scene for what’s to come—Stella’s own life will be in this same mold, slightly exaggerated and heightened beyond the ordinary. As some lives are. More (in the dramatic, external sense) happens to some people than to others—whether as an arbitrary outcome of the laws of probability or because certain characters attract drama. Of course, a great deal of the drama of a story resides in the way you tell it. That’s why it’s essential that Stella tell her own story, with her strong instinct for shaping and making meaning out of the accidents that befall her.

Was the central incident in the story—in which Stella’s cousin, Charlie, dies—inspired by something in particular, or drawn from news reports from the era?

This story has a really unlikely provenance. I read somewhere (I can’t remember where) about Marie-Thérèse, the daughter of Louis XVI, who was in prison with her parents and her favorite aunt, and saw them all go to the guillotine; she also nursed her sick little brother before he was taken away, never to be seen again. It’s the stuff of the grand narratives of history, nothing to do with the kind of private stories I write—and, also, from a long-ago period very unlike our own. Usually I’m suspicious of the idea that we can transfer feelings and experiences from one period of history and to another. I’m sure that in each era the very structure and texture of our vision and imagination are radically different, assembled out of different expectations, educations, languages, aesthetics, and so on. But something about this girl’s story lodged in my mind, and I found myself trying out bits of it, transposed into my own world. Of course I had to supply a different tragedy—yet commensurate with hers. What was moving was how by all accounts Marie-Thérèse was rather stolid and even unimaginative—and yet gifted with the ability to to bear her disproportionate tragedy with dignity. I don’t really know much about her—it was only a fragment that I came across. And my interest isn’t because I’m passionately Royalist, or even sympathetic to that strange court. In her life afterward, as the Duchesse d’Angouleme, I believe Marie-Thérèse became a bit of an unofficial saint for Catholic Ultra monarchists, and the episode in my story where Jean throws herself down in front of Andy, and Andy stands stiffly, then says that she doesn’t like scenes, is stolen from those after-years; as is the poignant business of the phantom pregnancies. Somehow it seems to suit Stella’s dramatizing tendency, to open the story of her life with a fragment lifted from one of the grand narratives of European history.

Often, stories told from the perspective of a child can feel overly precocious—the child has thoughts, or expresses those thoughts, in ways that are too sophisticated to be entirely believable. Here you have us seeing everything through the eyes of a child, but the expression of what she sees comes to us through a mature voice, the voice of Stella as an adult. Were you purposely trying to avoid the problem of credibility?

It’s always an interesting problem—Henry James solved it beautifully in “What Maisie Knew,” using all the ultra-sophisticated resources of his adult style, but limiting them to express a child’s consciousness. The thing not to do, I suspect (unless for a very specific purpose), is to try to write what a child would write, or even to use a child’s words as he or she would when describing the event out loud. This wouldn’t do justice to the range and expressiveness and power of a child’s awareness, which at that age can’t be adequately expressed in words—though, of course, in fragments, children can be superbly eloquent, and one ought to use that resource, too. (Although the adult Stella narrates the story, she slips in and out of the child Stella’s formulations and perceptions.) My choice, to explicitly have the adult Stella telling the story and commenting overtly on it from her adult perspective, wasn’t so much a strategy to solve a problem as part of my vision of Stella’s story from the beginning. I always wanted the adult Stella to frame things decisively, to make sense out of the events of her life in retrospect.

It seems to me that this story is not so much about honor, as the title suggests, as it is about shame: the horror that people felt in that era at the idea of being linked to any form of impropriety; the idea that a tragedy of this kind could also be a form of social embarrassment. What made you choose “Honor” as the title?

Honor and shame are bound together in a tight knot, aren’t they? You can’t have one without the other. So you’re quite right to ask about shame, which is important in this story, and pervades the world in which Stella grows up in—part of her defiance (later) is her defiance of that. In later stories, she asserts her honor, in the face of things that happen which could be read as shaming her. I’m thinking I might call the novel “Stella’s Honor.” I suppose I’m doing again the thing I said I was suspicious of: lifting a powerfully emotive idea from one world, and trying it out in a very different context. I rather love the idea of a chivalric ideal being played out in working-class nineteen-sixties Bristol. And I like the idea of Stella’s remaking the concept of honor, so bound up with men’s valor and women’s chastity, in a new image, that is better fitted to her own life and times. Part of what constitutes honor, too, may be that performance element we discussed above—that you can match your behavior under certain circumstances to an imagined model of conduct (which need not have anything to do with being good). Stella strongly feels the requirement to do so, I think. And it makes her brave. Perhaps there’s some honor in sustaining any role with conviction.

Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker ’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.